Great turnout at PodCamp Toronto this weekend, and lots of really interesting presentations. Kudos to the organizers for putting together this awesome event!
I received a lot of really interesting feedback after my presentation on “Leveraging Social Media”. As expected, most people treat SMM (Social Media Marketing) as a random event. The overabundance of social networks means most people don’t have a coherent strategy for marketing their content, or they end up optimizing for the wrong things: anchor text, headings, images, etc.
All of the above factors are great for your long-tail SEO performance, but if you want to make it big with SMM you should instead focus on time and velocity.
It turns out that for virtually every social network out there, the velocity of your story (number of votes since it was first posted) is the single most important determining factor of your success: more pageviews, more RSS subscribers, and higher profile. Due to the overabundance of content, these networks have to continuously promote fresher content, which to you as a publisher means one thing: time is against you. Intrigued? Check out the slides:
Also, take a look at Darren’s post-mortem on his 250,000-visitor encounter with SMM – a great example of the potential for SMM.
Update: The video of the Ilya’s presentation is now available on the PodCamp website. (Labeled about a third of the way down the page.)